“Repeal and Replace” Makes You Wonder

RUSH: This is Doug in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And welcome, sir. I’m really glad you waited. I appreciate your patience.

CALLER: Oh, no problem. Thank you very much for having me on. Thank you for all you do.

RUSH: I appreciate that, sir. Thank you.

CALLER: All right. I had a question. When I was watching the elections the other night, I noticed a common party line coming from all the Republican candidates, and they were, instead of saying “repealing” Obamacare, they were saying the term “replace” Obamacare, and I was wondering if I should take that as some form of foreshadowing that the Republican Party is planning on compromising with some form of socialized health care that —

RUSH: Well, what you should know is that the phrase “repeal and replace” is not new. As many Republicans have been saying for a couple of years now, Doug, there are some elements of Obamacare that they like and they want to keep, and one of them is the preexisting condition aspect. They do not want to be seen as wanting to take that away from people. And there are a couple other things. I don’t remember off the top of my head, but there are a couple of other elements of Obamacare that they claim are good and that people want, and it would make no sense to take ’em away.

So they came up with the phrase repeal but replace, and so your instinct, which is rooted in fear, is justified here, because if they just said repeal it and swipe it and then maybe have at it a different way, that would be one thing. But repeal and replace, yeah, that should make you wonder just how serious the commitment is. And a lot of people are wondering how serious the commitment. We’re gonna find out here pretty soon.

CALLER: Yeah, we’re gonna know sooner or later, aren’t we?

RUSH: Yeah, we are. But it sounds to me, Doug, that you’ve already got it figured out.

CALLER: Well, it seems to me like what they want to do is they want to just, as you said, keep all the parts that they like and we’re gonna end up with some sort of I guess bastardized version of socialized health care and it’s just gonna have a different name than Obamacare.

RUSH: Well, look, I don’t pretend to know what their intentions are. I know what their fears are. They are afraid of the media mischaracterizing what they do, and so everything they say is designed to limit a negative media response. Don’t doubt me on that. What they actually end up doing, we don’t know yet, but all I know is this replace and repeal business — they have said that there are a couple things, and I can’t remember all that they’ve mentioned. Not many, but two or three things they think are pretty good, that are good things that we should not broom. I’ve had ’em tell me this personally. The only one I remember is the preexisting condition thing.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The other big health care Obamacare “feature” (chuckles) if you will, that the Republicans say they want to keep because they say the American people like it is the provision that would keep your children legally on your family policy up to age 26. They do not want to repeal that. They don’t want to get rid of that. Republicans don’t. They claim that the American people really dig that, really like that.

The children of the American people really dig that and want to hold onto that, and they may be right about that, parents. Everybody’s scared to death of not having health insurance. Everybody’s scared to death of not getting medical treatment, particularly for their kids. And if they know their kids can’t get a job, and if their kids can’t find their own sources of health insurance, then the easiest thing to do is keep ’em on the policy, so do that.

You might like to throw other people’s kids out of their house, but not your own, is the way it works. So they may be right about that, too. You might call your neighbor whose kids are still living at home a bunch of slackers. But if your kids are living at home, they’re not slackers. The other guy’s kids are, but not yours.

So when somebody comes along and says, “Get these kids out of the house! Come on, they gotta be self-reliant. They can’t keep living off mom and dad.”

“Yeah! Right! Except for mine. Mine are different. It’s okay here.” So those are the two biggies that Republicans claim the American people would be up in arms about if they were ever eliminated: Preexisting conditions and kids continue to feed at the trough — uh, uh, stay on policy until age 26.